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Nightmare woke me at 3AM. One of those dreams that drives you from the bed into the bathroom so you can turn on a light and not wake your sweetheart who is blissfully sleeping. Light helped, as it always seems to, but the nightmare didn’t vanish into the haze of brightness. It clung to the inside of my head. I made some notes in my notebook hoping to get the bad thoughts out and down on paper, which is one of the reasons I so seldom have nightmares. I write my nightmares out, so there’s no need to dream them. I did everything I usually do to dissipate a bad dream and then I went back to bed.

I crawled in beside Jonathon. He curled around me in his sleep, nestling against me as automatically as he would draw covers around himself if he were cold. I expected to fall back asleep, but I didn’t. I lay there cuddled and warm with his breath soft against the back of my neck, but the nightmare was still in my head. Every time I started to drift off I’d be thrown right back where the nightmare ended last. By 5AM the tears started, silent, just tears, no sounds, no sobs, just tears that I couldn’t seem to stop and wasn’t sure why they were even happening. It was a bad dream, a stupid bad dream. I don’t usually have this kind of reaction to them.

I woke Jonathon up enough to let him know I was giving up on sleep and by 6AM I was in the bathroom, but I’d given up on quieting my mind for more sleep, I was just going to try to relax and get my mind on nicer things. I entertained myself until about 7:30AM and this included a long, hot bath complete with candles and scented bath salts. It’s usually a guaranteed mood lifter for me, and it did help. But I sit here typing this and my mood is not light.

I am dreading sitting down at the computer because yesterday’s pages ended with people my main character and I care about dead, and injured. It is a sad scene to go back to this aftermath. The only scene that I may need to put in earlier is no longer a happy scene, because like an overly omnipresent Deity I know now that the happy won’t last. So I either put in a scene that seems happy and know that soon it will all go horribly wrong, or I carry forward and deal with the emotional and physical aftermath of the battlefield. Anita and I are both tired of death.

It isn’t just my imaginary friend’s tradgedy, but where I had to go internally to write the scene and do it justice. To write about death I go to places where I’ve experienced it. I go that moment when someone I loved has died, and I remember how it feels. I dredge it up and I spread it on the paper. It isn’t as horrible as the first time I felt it, but the memories, the tactile, sensory memories are the worse. The smoothness of my mother’s coffin, the sweet clove scent of the pink carnations on her casket. The dogs that I’ve lost. The ones that I’ve been able to cuddle and hold while still warm, and real, before death does more than make them loose and somehow boneless in a way that sleep never does. The ones that we didn’t find that soon, so that the bodies were stiff and cold and didn’t feel real, though I knew it was. I know I never want to hold a person I love as I’ve held pets once rigor has set in and they are a caricature of themselves. I have dug enough graves in my life, and stood at enough gravesides, for this lifetime, but what makes it especially poignant is that I know with certainty I have not seen my last funeral, my last coffin, my last grief.

Anita has helped me understand that the need for vengeance is real, but ultimately unsatisfying. Because revenge only makes you feel better momentarily and then you have slain the monster that made you hurt, but the person you care about is still gone. If revenge could bring them back, or take the grief away, it would be so worth it. It can leave us with a sense of rightness, justification, but in the end there is sorrow and wondering how we got here and how we could have kept all the bad things from happening? The questioning will start as soon as the numbness goes. I have a day ahead where Anita will question herself, her motives, and she will both doubt herself, and find a renewed sense of ruthlessness. Revenge in the end is useless, but preventative violence, violence to keep those we love safe, now that’s something Anita and I both can get behind.